


mike townsend (knows what he's gotta do)

by baliset



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, existential musings on death and blaseball, mike townsend (can have little a character study as a treat), mike townsend (cares about his friends), mike townsend (has impostor syndrome), weird messed up blaseball afterlife headcanons ahead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26508157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baliset/pseuds/baliset
Summary: The thing about the void, Mike thinks, is that it’s not so different from regular blaseball, once your eyes adjust to the dark.(or: mike townsend meets the null team.)
Relationships: Mike Townsend & Derrick Krueger, Mike Townsend & Emmett Internet, Mike Townsend & Jaylen Hotdogfingers
Comments: 14
Kudos: 96





	mike townsend (knows what he's gotta do)

The thing about the void, Mike thinks, is that it’s not so different from regular blaseball, once your eyes adjust to the dark.

No, really. There’s a stadium here and everything; one that looks like it’s got bits and pieces of every team’s stadium grafted haphazardly onto it like pieces from twenty different jigsaw puzzles. Mike squints up at the darkened stadium lights and sees the curve of a massive, empty carapace jutting out over the stands, and thinks, _isn’t that the Crabitat?_ But the outfield where he’s standing is overgrown with knee-high flowers and smells aggressively, rottingly sweet, like a version of the Garden that no one’s been tending - and it’s _snowing_ , which Mike is pretty sure is a Breckinridge thing. He recognizes bits and pieces from Seattle, too, mostly the towering hunk of scrap metal where the commentators’ box should be.

Strangest of all, there are players on the field. Real, no-fooling players, playing a game of blaseball. Mike is too far in the outfield to keep track of who’s playing, and there’s no scoreboard anywhere he can see, but there’s a pitcher on the mound winding up, and there’s a runner getting ready to steal second. He doesn’t even get to see the pitch leave the mound - suddenly there’s a _crack_ , and the ball is sailing overhead, and Mike looks up just in time for it to wink out of sight in the dark. 

When he looks back towards the mound, the bases are loaded. And Mike thinks, _wait, that’s not right._

The other thing about the void is that Mike isn’t sure how he got here.

He remembers the plan, of course. The plan was for the Garages to drive the van into the void together, once the Talkers and the Magic had the portal open and stable. They were going to pick up Jaylen as a team. Mike remembers being sandwiched between Ron and Tot in the back of the van, remembers 

**(FIRE AND SMOKE)**

the horrible rumble of the wheels breaching the portal, remembers the smell of smoke and brimstone, and then

**(AN EGG HATCHING)**

he was here, in the void.

Part of him can’t help but wonder if the rest of the band made it out without him. He _knows_ they wouldn’t do it on purpose, but forgetting him in the void - classic Townsend, right? They’ve done the same at rest stops and other teams’ stadiums before, gotten as far as thirty minutes out on the road before Teddy went “oh shit, _Mike_ ” and the van had to turn around. And Mike was always exactly where they’d left him, chatting up a janitor or playing solitaire on his phone, just waiting for the band to come back and pick him up. Because, you know, despite all the jokes and the way the fans say his name, and the songs about him being a disappointment, Mike knows the team wouldn’t leave him behind.

Something else must have happened, something that wasn’t in the plan. Mike wonders if the rest of the Garages are outside the van, too, flung across the void by some force they didn’t anticipate and couldn’t comprehend. He looks towards the players on the field again, trying to make out faces, or at least the names on the backs of jerseys. They’re still too far away to see, so Mike starts wading through the flowers in the outfield to get a better vantage point.

He doesn’t make it as far as he’d like. In fact, he gets about five steps towards second base before someone says “TOWNSEND” with all the gain and distortion of a voice yelling full force into a microphone, the audio peaking as to become unrecognizable, and Mike feels a body slam into his. He has time to think that the Null Team players are remarkably _solid_ , for ghosts, and then his feet are leaving the ground and he’s being lifted bodily into a hug.

“Uh,” Mike says.

The person hugging him lets go abruptly, maybe sensing his discomfort, or maybe just not wanting to hug him for that long. They take a step back, and so does Mike, and he finds himself looking into a face he _knows_. 

Derrick Kreuger is standing there, beaming, and he looks nothing like the dead are supposed to look. In fact, he looks exactly the way Mike remembers him, right before he went up in flames. Taller than Mike, lanky, unshaven, with brown hair that flops across his eyes and curls over the nape of his neck. There’s a busted Garages cap perched on his head, the bill frayed and worn at the edges, but Derrick’s jersey sports a big, red question mark seared over his breast - the logo of the Null Team.

“Derrick,” Mike says, and feels a pang in his chest. 

Derrick was Jaylen’s replacement. He was only with the Garages for two seasons before being incinerated himself, and he never made much of an impression on anybody, but Mike liked him. Derrick was quiet, and he played the saxophone, and he listened to a lot of prog rock, which he said he’d picked up from his dads, who had been taking him to Rush concerts since he was four. Mike knows because he asked. He tries to get to know all the other pitchers, even if they don’t end up getting along. Even if there’s no knowing how long they’ll stick around.

“ _Townsend_ ,” Derrick says again, his face still lit up with painfully goofy enthusiasm, and it’s then that Mike realizes with dawning horror that it’s _his own_ voice coming out of Derrick’s mouth. It’s a sound byte, a perfect clip of the way he says his name in “Park It”.

“How are you doing that?” he asks, but by the time he gets the question out, Derrick is gone.

Mike doesn’t even see him go - it’s like one moment Derrick is there, and the next, he’s somewhere else. The crack of the bat sounds from the diamond again: the Null Team is still playing.

_\- yeah that happens_

The voice is gentle, but it makes Mike feel a little sick, like something’s rubbing up against the inside of his skull. His peripheral vision catches a flicker of color, and he turns his head a few degrees to the left to see a vaguely person-shaped mass of blood-red television static standing there, regarding him. At least, Mike _thinks_ it’s regarding him. It doesn’t have eyes.

_\- he’ll be back eventually_

the static offers, perhaps sensing that Mike would rather talk to another Garage. Though for all he knows, this could be another Garage.

“This is all you do here?” he asks, which is not really the question he wants to ask, but there are _too_ many questions he wants to ask, so he goes with the easiest one. “Play more blaseball?”

The mass of red static moves in a way that Mike thinks might be a shrug.

_\- i mean what else are we supposed to do_

The static winks out of existence, then, just as quickly as Derrick did before. 

This time, Mike looks to the diamond just to catch the static at the plate, a bat hovering inside the red mass of its body. Mike starts wading through the flowers to the infield again, insistently tracking the static with his eyes - it barely gets to hit the ball and then it’s suddenly on first, then second, without running a single step. Then it vanishes, flickering briefly into place on third base before it’s back home again. There are other batters hitting all the while, the ball cracking over and over with the force, sailing into the air then disappearing, reappearing in the pitcher’s hand.

It’s then that Mike notices the silence. No one is calling balls or strikes. There are no umpires here.

“Townsend, right?” someone asks, very close to his ear, then laughs when Mike jumps. “Sorry. You just got here, right? You’ve got that ‘new arrival’ look.”

Mike whips around, and manages to catch just a glimpse of a face he thinks might be Chorby Soul’s before it vanishes, replaced with the guilelessly smiling monitor of Emmett Internet.

“Emmett,” Mike says, feeling stuck in a bad dream. 

Most of the other Garages never liked Emmett, for reasons Mike thought was a little silly. Something about pirating music. He remembers Allison and Derrick (funnily enough) getting into an argument about it - maybe the last time they ever talked to each other, and it ended in Allison storming out of the locker room before the game. Mike doesn’t dare ask her if she regrets it, or even thinks about it at all. 

Anyway, Emmett was always nice to Mike, which made the inter-team rivalry lose some of its bite. Mike’s not even sure that Emmett _knew_ the Garages didn’t like them, or if they cared. The Garages didn’t play the Beams much, if at all, but Emmett always put personalized messages like **NICE PITCHING, MIKE!** or **GOOD GAME, LUIS!** on their screen during the end-of-game handshakes, and that was Mike’s favorite thing about playing them. Emmett also cornered him once during Party Time to talk about AI generated recipes for baking - Mike hadn’t been sure why the conversation was happening in the moment, but he’d realized later that he had brought a cake to the party, and Emmett was trying to _participate_ , to engage with him about his baking without being able to eat anything at all.

Emmett Internet was - _is_ \- a good kid, in Mike’s humble opinion. Not that anybody ever asked him.

 **HI MIKE!** Emmett’s screen says now, in pale, pixelated text. The screen clears, then more text appears shortly after. **UMPS GOT YOU?**

“Uh,” Mike says, because he’s not sure how to answer that, because he’s not even sure what _did_ happen to him. “I don’t think so. The band was coming to get Jaylen. Not - I mean, we _won_ her. They said we could come get her. But I don’t know where everyone else went.”

Emmett cocks their head like a dog trying to make sense of the word “no”.

 **YOU WON JAYLEN?** their screen reads, after a moment.

“Yeah,” Mike says. He’s not sure how much outside information the Null Team gets, and there’s no good starting point when it comes to explaining necromancy, so instead he asks, “You know about the idol board?”

 **A LITTLE.** Emmett shrugs. **RANDY TOLD ME.**

“Right,” Mike says, then swallows. He forgot about Randy. “Right. So, there was a blessing that let a team snag a player from the idol board, and someone figured out how to get Jaylen up there, so -”

He fumbles for words, and engs up gesturing vaguely towards himself, then towards the rest of the void. Classic Townsend.

 **HUH.** Emmett’s screen says.

“Yeah,” Mike says.

**WHY JAYLEN?**

“Well -” Mike starts, and then pauses. _First in, first out_ seems like a callous thing to say to anyone on this field, playing a warped version of the splort that got them killed in the first place. “It was easy to get people to rally for it, I guess. To keep Jaylen on the idol board, at number fourteen, where she needed to be. People got really excited about resurrecting the first player to ever get incinerated - they jumped on it before anybody on the team really thought it was an option. But then Jaylen was already on the board, and we had a big meeting about it, and we thought...we thought we’d go for it. Because if bringing Jaylen back works, maybe we can bring back everyone else.”

He shrugs, in the noncommittal way he tends to conclude his sentences when he knows he’s been talking for too long, and scratches the back of his neck. He wishes Derrick was back - Emmett’s great, of course, but Mike doesn’t usually spend much time talking to blaseball players who aren’t the Garages. He can hold a conversation with just about any musician in Seattle, and the staff of any stadium he pitches at, but there’s something about mingling with other teams that makes him feel like he’s at a party he was invited to by accident. Arturo calls it impostor syndrome, but Mike doesn’t feel like an impostor, or an alternate, or anything like that. He just feels like Mike Townsend, in a room full of people who aren’t.

Emmett’s screen lights up again. **I THINK IT’S SWEET.**

“Oh, uh,” Mike says, still scratching at his neck. “Thanks. I mean, it’s not my plan, but - hey, actually, have you seen anyone else from the band? I mean, the - the alive ones.” He grimaces. “No offense.”

 **I HAVEN’T.** Emmett gives their screen-head a little shake. A moment later, the text changes to an **:-0** face, then **GOTTA GO!**

Mike blinks. “What -”

 **TTYL MIKE!** flashes on Emmett’s screen just as they disappear - and Mike sees them on the diamond stepping up to the plate, the same as the figure made of red static did before. 

Mike is starting to get the picture that space and time don’t matter much in the void. The Null Team is still playing ball, sure, but they’re hitting and pitching and fielding at random, being moved all over the void at a speed somehow even faster than a regular game of blaseball. Mike can’t imagine what it would be like to find himself suddenly at bat in the middle of a pitch, or stealing second instead of catching a fly ball in the outfield. It makes his head spin just thinking about it.

“ _Mike Townsend,_ ” Teddy’s voice warbles from nearby - except it’s not Teddy, it’s Derrick, back in the outfield and grinning at Mike again.

“How are you _doing_ that,” Mike asks again, because he never got an answer last time.

Derrick shrugs, and makes a noise like a radio tracking through different stations, the hum of static and half-words from a dozen different voices spilling out of his mouth before he lands on the one he wants.

“ _Emotional feedback on timeless wavelength,_ ” he says, this time, and it takes Mike a second to reconcile with the fact that he’s hearing “The Spirit of Radio” coming out of Derrick Kreuger’s mouth.

“You’ll get used to it,” someone calls over from left field - Mike thinks it’s Mickey Woods, but he can’t tell. “The people who’ve been here longer are a little…” She wobbles a hand in the air, like she can’t come up with the right word. “They work with what they’ve got. Just be glad you’re not talking to Elftower.”

“Right on,” Mike says, on autopilot, because he doesn’t know what else to say. He feels that pang in his chest again, at the idea of Derrick stuck here, only able to talk through other singers’ voices. Talk about impostor syndrome.

“Have you seen Jaylen?” he asks, not directing the question to either Derrick or Mickey, but hoping one of them might answer regardless. “The band was coming to pick her up but I - I might be the only one who got here.”

Derrick makes that noise again, the radio-noise. It takes longer this time, and his eyebrows are furrowed with worry, or maybe frustration, like he already knows Mike won’t get what he’s about to say.

“ _Consuming the colony,_ ” is what comes out of him, in a voice Mike doesn’t recognize. “ _The circle rules your mind._ ”

Mike bites the inside of his cheek, thinking. He could stand here and play twenty questions with Derrick, but Derrick’s going to have to go bat, or pitch, or something else eventually, and finding Jaylen can’t wait. Not with the rest of the team missing.

“Give me a hint,” he says, pleadingly.

“ _In a spiral of ants,_ ” Derrick says, in the same voice, looking slightly more desperate than before.

Ants. Mike has heard this one before - not the song, but the phenomenon. Inez from the Flowers told him about it once, when the Flowers were in Seattle. There’s some kind of natural phenomenon where ants will lose the pheromone trail and just go in circles forever, repeating the same actions over and over until they die.

“Jaylen’s here,” he says slowly, trying to work through the idea out loud. “I mean, of course Jaylen’s here. But you - the longer you’re here, the more you keep doing the same stuff over and over.”

“ _Hummingbird suspended in the aspic of the world,_ ” Derrick supplies helpfully. 

Mike knows that one - that’s “Ballad of Barry Allen”. He swallows.

“It gets _faster_ ,” he says, more sure of the idea now, though he has a pit in his stomach that’s growing the more he talks through it. “And it’s like - the ant circle thing? You keep going, even if it hurts?”

Derrick nods. He’s back to smiling, in such an encouraging way that Mike doesn’t need any more lyrics to tell him he’s right.

“So…” Mike says, “she’s everywhere? She’s just all over the place?”

Derrick nods again.

Mike should feel good about this. He didn’t expect to have to work his way through void logic, or talk to Null Team players who can’t communicate the way they used to be able to. He wasn’t supposed to be a part of the plan at all, except for sitting in the van on the way to get Jaylen. But something decided to let him do it all on his own, to make him the hero.

He doesn’t feel good, though. He just feels sad. How can he only save Jaylen when Emmett, and Mickey, and Chorby, and Tiana, and Shaquille, and Derrick, and everyone else will still be here, flitting around the field like ghosts, playing their hearts out until all they are is the game? What gives him the right to choose who comes back, and who stays dead? He’s not a blaseball god, or an umpire, or any kind of big hero. He’s just Mike Townsend.

“I -” he begins, but Derrick is gripping his forearm suddenly, and they’re nearly nose to nose, and it stops the words in Mike’s throat.

“ _They found a way to get her from the shadows,_ ” Derrick says - and it’s Teddy’s voice again, definitely the Garages, but it’s not a song Mike has heard before. “ _But they need someone to go to where the map shows._ ”

“I don’t -” Mike starts again.

“ _Mike Townsend knows what he’s gotta do,_ ” Derrick says, resolving the melody, and the words sit like a weight on Mike’s sternum. It’s another Garages song about him, one that maybe hasn’t been written yet. About him, and Jaylen. And the void.

“I _don’t_ ,” he insists.

“ _Mike Townsend knows what he’s gotta do,_ ” Derrick repeats, and then he’s gone.

Well. Not _gone_ gone - Mike can see him at the plate, which must be pretty exciting for Derrick, considering he never got to do any batting before he was incinerated. But he’s not in the outfield anymore, and there’s no knowing when he’ll come back.

“Okay,” Mike says to himself, his throat dry. “Jaylen.”

If Jaylen is everywhere, then how is he supposed to take her back with him? Nothing about the ritual the Talkers and the Magic prepared suggested that as a possibility, and Mike never heard Teddy say anything about it when he was rounding up the band. Everyone just assumed the Null Team was just sitting around waiting for someone to come get them, or that they were ghosts, and they weren’t capable of thinking, or moving, or waiting. No one said anything about endless games of blaseball in the void.

Maybe there’s something to that, though. The void was unexpected. So what if Mike does something just as unexpected to try and stabilize Jaylen again, something that’s never happened in blaseball before? What if he goes against the rules so hard, pitches so badly, that it shocks Jaylen back to this time and place just long enough to grab her and get out of here? Mike doesn’t even need to consider if he’s capable of doing it - he’s Mike Townsend, after all. Of course he can pitch that badly.

Mike hears the familiar _thwap_ of the ball hitting the inside of a glove, and turns to see Mickey Woods briefly airborne, having leapt up to snatch a fly ball out of the air. This is the first time he’s seen any Null Team fielders actually catch anything - though maybe there are multiple balls in play at once, here, because the next batter is already swinging for the fences.

“Hey,” Mike calls, before Mickey can toss the ball in her glove back to the mound. “Can I have that?”

Mickey stops mid-windup. She turns to look at him with a posture Mike can only read as quizzical, and holds up the blaseball for him to see, like she wants to make sure he knows what he’s talking about.

“This?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Mike says. He adjusts his posture, trying to seem more confident than he is, spreading his legs and holding his hands out to catch. “Please?”

Mickey tosses the ball with an underhand that should drop it right down to Mike, but he fumbles the catch anyway. His sweaty palms slip over the stitches, and the ball nearly slides out of his grasp before he closes one hand over the other and clutches the ball tight in between them, fingers laced like he’s praying. It doesn’t feel like a real blaseball, somehow. It feels more malleable, like he could shape the ball in his hands if he felt like it, press it flat into a disc or squeeze it into a formless lump of clay in his fist.

He doesn’t, though. He needs it to be a ball.

Only six pitchers have ever been incinerated, besides Jaylen. Mike knows this because he runs the math in his head every time the Garages take the field under the shadow of an eclipse. He also knows this because every time it’s happened, he’s sent the grieving team a gift basket full of pastries - or made everyone in the band their favorite pastries, in the case of Derrick. Mike isn’t the kind of person who tries to spit in the gods’ eye over something like incineration. The Garages can write as many songs as they want about charging into heaven and killing the gods, but Mike worries about the players left on Earth, the people who are mourning. Maybe if he could do more for them, could _have done_ more for them, they wouldn’t be resorting to necromancy now.

Still. Six pitchers, plus Jaylen. Assuming the pitchers are the only ones being rotated to the mound, when they’re not fielding or batting, that’s as small of a margin for error as Mike can possibly hope for. He steps towards the infield, getting as close as he dares to second base without being in the way of any of the Null Team players. It’s easy for him. He’s so used to feeling in the way that he’s acutely aware of where everyone is, even when they’re teleporting all over the field.

Mike watches the mound carefully, and runs the math in his head. _Six pitchers, plus Jaylen._ He sees someone in the magenta and yellow of the Magic winding up, then someone in the lime green of the Fridays throwing the ball. A Lover winds up, a Millenial throws. A Garage - that’s Derrick - winds up, and a Jazz Hand throws.

And then Mike sees it.

In between the pitchers as they trade off, there’s something else spliced in, like a single frame of a movie carefully altered or replaced by something else. It’s fast enough that it’s almost subliminal, a shadow that Mike isn’t even sure he’s really seeing until the third or fourth time he catches it. Once he knows it’s really there, though, he can’t _stop_ seeing it, can’t stop tracking the pattern with his eyes until it’s practically all he’s seeing.

He knows it’s Jaylen. And he knows what he has to do.

“Hey, Hotdogfingers!” Mike says, at the top of his lungs, preempting the shadow right before it appears again.

Time seems to stop in the void. The players slow at their stations. The shadow on the mound flickers, stays stable, and starts to turn out of a windup to look at Mike.

Mike doesn’t wait for it to finish. He winds up, too, and throws the ball in his hand as hard as he can at the shadow.

Hitting a player with the ball is something Mike has never done before. He’s not sure anyone in blaseball has done it. He always thought it was something you would have to _try_ to do, even as an abysmal pitcher, even with players of various shapes and sizes whose strike zones are all over the place. But now that he’s doing it, Mike can see how easy it is just to whip the ball at someone’s center of mass, rather than aiming for a bat or a glove or a catcher behind them. How easy it is to breach the trust the other players have in you to do the right thing, and hurt someone on purpose.

Mike wonders if this is what the umpires realized, when the Book was opened.

In the next moment, the blaseball strikes the shadow and makes a sound like a tuning fork being struck against a hard surface. The sound visibly reverberates through the shadow, the edges of it rippling like a lake disturbed by stones, until it resolves itself into the solid shape of Jaylen Hotdogfingers, pitcher for the Seattle Garages.

“Mike?” she asks, one hand gripping the ball he just chucked at her.

“Jaylen,” he says, deflating with relief.

Jaylen steps off the mound, and Mike crosses second base to meet her, trying to swallow past a lump that’s risen in his throat. She looks exactly the same as he remembers her. This whole season, getting her back has felt like an unattainable goal, like some side project for the band to fiddle with in their spare time, but now Jaylen is _here_ , in front of him. This is _happening_.

“I’m so glad it was you,” Jaylen says. She reaches out to grab his hand, to pull him into a hug, and

**(JAYLEN HOTDOGFINGERS RETURNS)**

Mike feels a sharp pull in his chest. He smiles.

“Me too,” he says, and,

**(MIKE TOWNSEND RETREATS TO THE SHADOWS)**

“Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> so this was supposed to be like 500 words and turned into a whole THING, huh.
> 
> the characterization of the null team and several of its members here is heavily based on the @NullTeam1 twitter account, which makes me think about derrick kreuger and how he replaced jaylen and then also got incinerated on a daily basis. some of the other characterization/worldbuilding is bits and pieces that i've gleaned from the wiki/rp community, and some is just from me spitballing. i'm not a garages fan on the website, just in my heart!
> 
> the songs derrick quotes in this fic are "park it", "mike townsend (is a disappointment", and "mike townsend (knows what he's gotta do)" by the garages on bandcamp, "the spirit of radio" by rush, "spiral of ants" by lemon demon, and "the ballad of barry allen" by jim's big ego.
> 
> i'm not usually in the main blaseball discord, but you can find me on twitter @corpserevivers.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] mike townsend (knows what he's gotta do)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26547049) by [ivyns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyns/pseuds/ivyns)




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